If you’re a rational, sensible human being who doesn’t know who David Tredinnick is, then you’re about to get very upset. Tredinnick is the Conservative MP for Bosworth, and a member of the Commons health, and science and technology committees. He also genuinely believes that the position of the sun, moon and planets when you were born has a profound effect on your life. And so, about once a year or so, he pops up in the media making bizarre, and frankly worrying, proclamations. Like on Wednesday, when he claimed that ‘astrology could help take pressure off NHS doctors’, among other things.

The claims come from an interview with Tredinnick in a recent issue of the Astrological Journal, a bi-monthly magazine produced by the Astrological Association. In it, Tredinnick argues that astrology is “a useful diagnostic tool” and “should have a role to play in healthcare”, while simultaneously denouncing opponents and critics as “driven by superstition, ignorance and prejudice”, and, er, being “racially prejudice”. There’s so much nonsense here, it’s difficult to know where to start. But let’s have a look to see whether his claims stand up under close scrutiny (spoiler: they don’t).

“Astrology is a useful diagnostic tool”

Tredinnick appears to believe in a branch of pseudoscience called natal astrology, which holds that if you get a person’s exact time, date and location of birth, you can use it to construct an astrological chart that will predict what’s going to happen to them over their lifetime. From a medical point of view, this would be amazing, for obvious reasons. The problem is that there is no evidence that natal astrology can accurately predict, well, anything. In 1985, Shawn Carlson a physicist at UC Berkeley, published a paper in Nature in which he assessed whether natal charts could be used to accurately describe a person’s personality traits. The answer was a resounding no; in a series of double-blind trials, both astrologer and non-astrologer participants essentially performed at chance levels.

There’s other evidence. In 2003, scientist and former astrologer Geoffrey Dean teamed up with Professor Ivan Kelly from the University of Saskatchewan, and performed a meta-analysis of over 40 studies, consisting of 700 astrologers and 1,150 birth charts. They looked at the accuracy with which astrologers in these studies could match birth charts with information about personality and case histories. Again, overall performance was no better than chance.

So is astrology a useful diagnostic tool that has a role to play in healthcare? The evidence would suggest not. You would probably have as much success predicting someone’s personality by using the Bristol stool chart as you would from an astrology chart. At least the former is useful from a medical point of view.

“Astrology and complementary medicine would help take the huge pressure off doctors”

Not if they’re not actually doing anything useful; in fact, they would probably end up creating a much bigger burden on the healthcare system. For one, putting off effective treatments in favour of unproven alternative medicines might cause more serious health complications to arise, creating extra pressure later down the line. But apart from that, there’s ample evidence to suggest that belief in alternative medicines can do real damage in other ways. For example, a 2003 Lancet paper titled ‘Psychology and survival’ looked at the deaths of nearly 30,000 Chinese-Americans, and found people were more likely to die significantly earlier if they had an unlucky combination of disease and birthyear, as dictated by astrology. The authors of that particular study concluded that this reduction in survival rate seems to arise, at least in part, through psychosomatic factors – effectively, astrology can act as a nocebo.

“Scientists today are dismissive of right-side brain energy”

That’s because the idea that there are ‘right-brain’ and ‘left brain’ thinkers is unequivocally a load of rubbish. A huge study of 1,000 people in 2013, published in Plos One, found no evidence that people primarily show dominance in one side of the brain over the other. In other words, people aren’t ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’. It’s nonsense, pure and simple.

Opposition to astrology is driven by “superstition, ignorance and prejudice”

This seems to be one of the stranger claims that Tredinnick appears to make. But a study from 2014 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology might help to put things in perspective. Across a series of experiments, Justin Friesen and colleagues looked at how individuals try to rationalise and protect their own beliefs in the face of scrutiny and criticism. Although we would like to think that we hold beliefs that tell us something fundamentally true about the world, in reality it can be very difficult to accept information that shows our beliefs to be wrong in some way. According to Friesen’s team, people avoid this sort of eventuality by building in a certain amount of unfalsifiability into their beliefs.

In other words, if we rationalise that our beliefs are beyond the realms of testing, they can never be refuted – therefore they become strong beliefs, resistant to contradictory evidence. Tredinnick’s attacks on opponents of astrology seem to be driven by this idea. When faced with strong criticism from evidence-based scientists, it’s easier to assert that they must be ignorant or prejudiced, rather than reject a long-held personal set of beliefs. Other astrologers have similarly argued away claims that the discipline doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, by claiming that while scientific testing might work for things like physics and chemistry, astrology is simply too complex to be viable for statistical testing.

This is all well and good, but then Tredinnick throws in a curveball by saying that opponents of astrology are “racially prejudiced”. I could try and attempt an objective analysis of this claim, but really, what’s the point? Either he’s spectacularly trolling everyone by channeling the spirit of Ali G, or he doesn’t understand what racially prejudiced means. Given the lack of understanding that seems apparent in the rest of his claims, I think the answer is obvious.

In short, Tredinnick’s interview responses seem to betray a woeful lack of understanding about science and the importance of objective evidence. This, coupled with the fact that he sits on government select committees concerning science, technology and health, feels like a potentially dangerous yet easily avoidable state of affairs. As Mark Henderson points out in the Geek Manifesto, the fact that we’re in this mess seems to be more indicative of a general indifference to science in Westminster, rather than any conscious resistance to it. That’s not to say nothing can be done about the situation though. There’s an e-petition to have Tredinnick removed from the select committees here, if you’re interested in signing it. And failing that: Bosworth, the election’s not far away.